*So rather than taking aggressive steps to create fairer funding systems for schools to give poor kids a shot, to weed out bad teachers, or jettison policies that have clearly outlived their usefulness, we have phony wars about teacher pay or No Child Left Behind that dance around the real issues.

*A sad irony of Occupy Wall Street is that the movement is being embraced by the teachers’ union. The unions are hardly the only cause of our educational problems, but they’re not doing enough to fix them. In ways large and small, they defend practices and policies — things like how teacher pay is factored into the amount of money that is allotted to individual schools — that disadvantage low-income students.